RAPID HEARTBEAT
Sometimes, a heart races wildly. This can be very dangerous, because if a person’s heart pumps too fast for too long, it can lead to cardiac arrest and eventually death.
Some churches’ monitors show that their hearts are beating two or three times faster than a healthy heart. Because these churches love God and want to be faithful to His love for lost people, they launch outreach program after outreach program and initiative after initiative. Church members grow tired and exhausted as the congregation jumps into the latest evangelistic fads.
Outreach is not organic in a church like this. Instead, it feels fabricated and inauthentic. While the motives are right, the practice of outreach is so forced that it fails to bear much fruit. Churches like this often experience frustration when they try lots of programs but never find something that works. They invest lots of money and time, and they genuinely love God, but lost people rarely come to know and embrace Jesus.
These churches need to love God enough to slow down. If they want to establish an organic culture of outreach, they need to do less to accomplish more. Better yet, they need to channel their energy, time, and resources into a sustainable approach to church-wide evangelism. Whatever the condition of your church’s heart, know that God is ready to increase your love quotient. Evangelism is not a sprint; it’s a marathon. It’s not a fad; it’s the fabric of a healthy church. It’s not a system or a program; it’s the natural fruit of a church that loves God.
GETTING BACK TO YOUR FIRST LOVE
The first and most critical step a church needs to take to move toward healthy outreach is to develop a growing love for God. In the book of Revelation, Jesus says to the church of Ephesus, “Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love.” Whenever our love for God ceases to be first place in our hearts, our vision for reaching out wanes.
Jesus made this clear when He taught his disciples that the first and most important of all the commandments is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” This is not just our calling as individual followers of Christ; it is also our calling as a church. If we forget our first love, our collective heart will grow cold, and nothing that we do will have the impact we desire.
Loving God does not begin with our own efforts. It is based on the awareness that God was passionately seeking us long before we ever sought Him. In the letter of First John, we find a powerful tutorial on the love of God. We learn, first and foremost, that God is love. Because of His love for us, we can become children of God. The depth of the Father’s love was revealed when He sent His only Son to this Earth to die in our place on the cross for our sins. As we are grounded in God’s love for us and as we learn to walk in this love, we will continue to grow in our love for people and for God.
If your church is struggling to invest in reaching your community and the world, ask yourself this question: are we a church that is on fire with a passion for God? If reaching out to others has been pushed to the back burner (or off the stove entirely), it probably won’t help to add some spice to the meal. You need to start by turning up the heat.
Maybe your church has lost its first love.
Remember, God so loved the world that He gave.
Love gives. And when a congregation’s heart pounds hard for God, we give of ourselves—our time, our resources, our lives—to love others.
This article adapted from Organic Outreach for Churches.
